How can I search for a substring within a cell array and return the whole string in that cell?

Question

I'm going nuts searching for a way of doing this while using Excel functions.

Need to search a substring within a cell array and get returned the whole string of that cell.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The problem is the cell array. You can search a single cell with FIND

 =(IF(IFERROR(FIND("AB",A4),0)>0,(A4),""))

will search A4 for the substring "AB" and return either the cell contents or null string. I think you'd need to write a UDF to get it to operate on a cell array

  Public Function SearchCells(RangeToSearch As Range, TextToFind As String) As String
  Dim r As Range
  Dim a As String
  For Each r In RangeToSearch
     If InStr(r.Text, TextToFind) > 0 Then
        a = r.Text
        Exit For
    End If
  Next r
  SearchCells = a
  End Function